


footsteps

by kiyokoinred



Category: Magisterium Series - Holly Black & Cassandra Clare
Genre: (most of the character tags are minor fyi), Character Study, Gen, No Maugris, plus adding in one of my personal HC's b/c whoop, trying to get an insight into who he was and what he went through and what he did
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-21
Updated: 2020-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:02:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28138131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiyokoinred/pseuds/kiyokoinred
Summary: indeed, constantine has passed through here / for here are his footprintsa constantine madden character study
Comments: 18
Kudos: 17





	footsteps

**Author's Note:**

> merry xmas !!!
> 
> i hope you enjoy this <3 the idea of creating this kind of story for constantine -- a portrait of sort -- first plagued my head a while ago and i have to admit that i only thought it would be 3k at the most but i kept returning to this document to add scenes and ideas and.... well, here it is:
> 
> (tw // a bit of gory imagery in some places & slaps that can be read as child abuse (i am just realising) but are super not intended to be so & then actual grooming/child abuse & lastly some murder ... & death, but not explicit at all)

## [ 19 ]

you stand at a precipice and you can’t stop looking behind you.

a bit further ahead of you is everything you ever wanted -- your dead brother returned, your old masters punished, the unfeeling world and its heartless cycle of life and death made better. you won’t be expected to obey anyone ever again. not your mother, not joseph, not even death itself. 

it’s all so tantalisingly close; you can almost taste it.

but instead of focusing on that future -- as you have unerringly every dawn, day, dusk, and dreaming moment since you left the magisterium nearly ten years ago -- you watch your back. 

because even those who are special can fail here, a stone’s throw from the end.

but you won’t be like them. 

you’re twenty-three years old and you’ll be better than everyone else.

( _you weren’t_ )

## [ 9 ]

when you raise your hands, everything changes.

inky blackness curls off your fingertips with the same languid grace of a cat stretching after napping in the sun for too long. it quickly gets to work, snatching up the rubble in the air. only a while ago, the stone seemed to be falling too quickly for anyone to do anything, but now you find it child’s play to clean up the mess and eliminate the danger.

before you can turn to your friends and your brother and check that no one was injured, some other apprentices spring up in front of you. they thank you loudly with vigorous hand-shakes and rambling speeches. even a few tears are shed.

a few ask you how you did what you did, with awe-stricken expressions that pool warmth at the bottom of your stomach, but then, the rest of the apprentices tell them to hush and they all scurry away. 

however, they all end up chattering, once they think you can’t hear them, about what the appearance of a makar means for them. about what good fortune the virginian magisterium has.

( _but constantine madden was the worst makar_ )

you have just turned fourteen years old and you’ve always wanted to be special.

## [ 1 ]

only on the coldest evenings does your mother conjure fire.

the three of you cluster together beneath all the threadbare blankets you possess in front of the empty fireplace. you and jericho babble on together for several minutes before your mother shushes you both and demands utter silence. you fall mute but cannot stop bouncing your legs.

whenever your mother calls down the flames, she gets on her knees and clutches her hands together and stares forward, just as she does when she prays in church each sunday.

nobody talks to you or your family in the large, golden building you get dragged to every week like clockwork. you aren’t sure why your mother insists on you all sitting in silence for hours on end but think it may have something to do with her deep connections to the holy ones.

you learned about them all, _the_ _saints and jesus and god and the holy spirit_ , when you first snuck into the church. you did so to take their big, green, fuzzy book back to the apartment and stay up late every night for several months, reading it diligently from cover to cover.

you’ve been told that you’re talented for your age -- that with your reading abilities and capacity for handling numbers and sums, you’re _special_ , even. it’s not the kind of special you want to be but the praise still warms you inside.

there’s one passage in the green tome, though, that transfixes you enough to dog-ear the page the first time you read it and, unlike with most of the rest of the church’s book, you think you truly understand it instantaneously.

_When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance._

even when you finish the whole thing, you come back to that part. you can’t help but draw links between the scene the book describes and the experiences of your own life. you’ve seen your mother play with fire like that. _your_ mother! of course, you haven’t seen her use it to grow for other people different tongues, as in the text, but she can conjure flames up from nowhere, doesn’t even need the soggy matches you keep in the pot in the corner, and that’s just as extraordinary. 

so -- since you know that only heaven can do extraordinary things with fire, that god is responsible for all incredible feats accomplished on earth -- your mother must be blessed.

( _you wanted to be blessed too?_ )

when you finally ask her what it’s like to use heaven’s powers, she taps the top of your blond head and warns you, “never mention my abilities to anyone outside our family.”

your family. a small, three-person, six-legged family. 

without elaborating, your mother pulls you and your brother in close and neither of you makes any attempt to draw your gaze away from the flames that she nurtured in her palms as they dance about in the sooty fireplace.

you don’t understand why you can’t talk to anyone about it. surely the old man in the white robes at the church would want to hear about miracles being performed right in front of his nose? or the mean kids down the road who keep insisting that they’re better because they have two parents and you and jericho only have one?

but you say nothing because you are six years old and she is your mother and you trust her.

## [ 7 ]

you realise for the first time that you have friends sometime towards the end of your iron year at the magisterium.

you’ve been rooming with four others the whole time, all of them chosen, just like you, by master rufus. he’s generally regarded as the very best master in the school, a fact which makes something inside you flutter around like it’s a delicate creature trapped inside a miniature snowstorm. you might not have been caught in one of those for quite some time but the dizzy sensation is unforgettable.

what’s also unforgettable, to your roommates at least, is that, for an embarrassingly long time, you didn’t know that sarah and declan were twins. like you and jericho. 

when the realisation sinks in, you’re more than a little disappointed in yourself that you hadn’t figured it out alone. they’re both eleven, look alike, and share the same, rather distinctive, last name -- novak. 

when you do finally connect the dots, one sweltering evening in the dorm, all the doors cracked open, sarah breaks down into tearful laughter and declan giggles himself silly right along with her. their reaction isn’t what surprises you, though.

what shocks you is that even your own brother, notoriously timid jericho, pokes fun at you, taunting you for being so unobservant.

for the first time, you don’t agree with him. 

it isn’t a matter of observation; not in _that_ way, at least, since, before coming to the magisterium, you and jericho were the only children you ever really paid much attention to. you only looked elsewhere to take note if someone was crying because they took something you said the wrong way. 

as you and your brother are identical twins -- something, you learn that evening, which is _very_ different to fraternal twins, to which the novaks belong -- it had been perfectly reasonable to assume that all siblings had to be like you two. had to look the same. had to fill in each other’s deficiencies.

but, that evening, you learn that that’s not the case.

( _you seriously wondered how you could live without your brother by your side?_

_you actually thought it’d be a little fun?_ )

only one of your four companions doesn’t laugh at you or attempt to mock you. 

alastair hunt. who’s pressed up against your side. 

with a weary, lung-rattling sigh, he tells you not to bother with responding to the others’ teasing. but he’s so often a victim of sarah’s taunts in particular, that you wonder if you should really take his advice. it certainly hasn’t helped him!

then he pulls you, by the sleeve, over to a corner that the novaks have filled with plump beanbags and forces you, with an arched hand on your chest, to collapse into its uncomfortable embrace.

you’re confused by his actions. you’ve done your best to make him like you -- as you set out to do with the rest of your cohort -- but the efforts have never seemed to pay off. he always tended to hold you at some distance, unwilling to either stand too close or talk for too long.

and so, you’re confused. you remain this way, perplexed by your fellow apprentice’s unexpectedly familiar actions, until he pulls an enormous tome out of nowhere and begins to read aloud from it, without even asking if you want to hear anything from it. 

figures he only needed you as a reading partner.

the book itself, once you settle down and actually listen, is about the ancient mage-knights of christendom, how they fought up and down a continent to spread their influence. despite ostensibly being magical in some manner, they all prefer using their swords to get their jobs done.

you don’t blame them -- your first year of learning magic at the magisterium has been a _lot_ harder than you ever thought it would be. you think you would choose physical weaponry over tricksy magic to if you had to as well.

you sit there for quite some time, letting the story wash over you. you’re stunned at your own actions. or, rather, _that’s_ the excuse you use later. you aren’t actually entirely sure, in the moment, why you don’t storm away immediately and slam closed the door to your room. you haven’t been interested in listening to stories for years. not since your mother stopped doing it, disappointed by your betrayal.

jericho comes over. he pats you on the head several times, as though you’re sad and he needs to comfort you. 

but you aren’t, though. 

the novak twins make their way over next and settle themselves in the leftover space between yourself, your brother, and alastair. you can’t stop thinking about the chilly nights you spent as part of a three-person family on the other side of the world. huddled amongst the only other people who mattered to you at the time.

the unquestionable similarity of the moment makes you wonder if your family has expanded to include your new dorm mates.

you are twelve years old and you hope that the little solar system of people that you love and people who love you is on the brink of exploding into a whole, goddamn universe.

## [ 12 ]

everyone hates you. 

it really happened in the blink of an eye, like your mother always warned you -- through her actions, if not her words.

the vitriolic hate your former friends and teachers shouted at you the very last time you talked with any of them haunts your dreams. 

you suspect that the words will never leave you, not for as long as you live. however far off that might actually be.

all you really hope for nowadays is that you manage to stay alive long enough to see your brother returned. 

( _you wanted to rest_ )

each and every person that once cared for you of their own free will, as opposed to the gravity that ensnared your mother from the moment of your birth, has turned against you. as much as this affects you, the pain really doesn’t compare to the calcified mass of _hurt_ you’ve been carrying around inside you ever since you first made the decision to resurrect your brother and didn’t look back.

you are sixteen years old and it’s better than your fifteenth year but only just.

## [ 6 ]

you’re wearing clothes that still don’t fit you, even though you bought them over a year ago. you’re struggling not to fidget as you stand in a drafty corridor, waiting to be let into the next room of the iron trial so you can prove yourself and show your mother that you didn’t expose the family’s magical secret for nothing, that you’ll be able to make yourself useful to her in some magical way.

beside you, jericho’s hand is trembling. you take care to reach out and grab it, reassure him with dancing fingertips on sweaty skin that he’s not alone, that you’ll be doing this together. 

he gives you a small smile, lop-sided and shy. 

you don’t smile back.

( _why didn’t you smile back?_ )

you don’t smile back because pinpricks of worry are starting to form in your mind as you wonder what the masters will think of the two of you, relying on each other in this way. you wouldn’t be able to say for certain that they’d disapprove -- you’ve seen enough sniffling children already today to be reasonably sure that an outward sign of the stress you and jericho are going through is not solely limited to yourselves. 

still. 

you only get one shot at this. so, you need to be perfect -- unlike everyone else here.

right as you start to disentangle your hands, encouraged by a picture steadily forming in your mind of your future acceptance into the magisterium, a booming voice in your head calls for all the mage-prospects to enter a door ahead and proceed to the next stage. jericho pulls free of his own accord, thankfully sparing you the trouble of doing it yourself. he walks toward the door ahead. everyone walks towards the door.

sucking in a deep breath, you remind yourself of all of the practice you’ve been doing, since the moment you first realised that you could control fire like your mother and begged her to teach you. of course, she had refused to teach you anything and didn’t relent to your pleas until stern-looking mages in big, black coats and with bright, burning blue eyes appeared on your doorstep and demanded that you attend a mandatory examination. noticing the similarities between yourself and jericho, they’d insisted on him coming too, even though he hadn’t shown any of the signs that you did of possessing some magical affinity.

you still aren’t sure how they found you out. nor how they knew exactly which run-up apartment complex to visit. you hope they used magic. you wish you could use magic like that in the future.

regardless, recognising a lost battle, your mother relented to your demands and began teaching you and your brother how to connect to the world around you, how to access its inner energy, how to manifest small but impressive feats of wonder.

she scowled the whole time she did so.

the only time her frown tended to erode a little, to give way to a hesitant look of pride, was when you accomplished something extraordinary. whenever you showed a prodigious capacity for doing magic.

you aren’t entirely sure why. so much about your mother remains elusive and unknown to you even now. maybe it was because your rapid advancement was impressing her, maybe it finally made her proud that you were her child. 

or maybe she liked having you (an argumentative, troublesome, noisy, and problem-causing boy) only when you excelled. it would certainly explain why she abstained from hitting you for a lengthy period of time if you succeeded at completing whatever magical assignment she had given you. particularly if it only took one evening.

you’re still standing in a freezing corridor, abandoned by all those other examiners your age, and you can’t help but imagine with delight her reaction to you entering the magisterium.

you are eleven years old and you’re going to come first in this trial, no matter what.

## [ 3 ]

you aren’t sure why you do it but one day you tell the head bishop what your mother does with fire.

he talks with her alone in the diaconicon for a long time after a sunday service and when they both emerge, your mother slaps you once, the first time she’s ever done so, and tells you to pack up your belongings. “because we are moving away,” she says simply.

you don’t understand. the local school you and jericho attend is putting on a kind of theatre production soon and you were thinking of auditioning, to see if your talent with reading books translates into script recitation. 

you don’t want to say goodbye to that opportunity!

but, when you plead for her to reconsider, she tells you giving the audition up will be your punishment for disobeying her, for breaking her trust in you that you would keep her secrets to yourself. she wants you to promise to her that you will never, _ever_ do anything like that again. 

she warns you that, despite what you think about her, people do not like being around someone who can create fire from nothing. she tells you that she hopes dearly that she has not passed on her powers to you, has not “cursed you.”

nevertheless, even though she says all this in her sternest voice, you still secretly hope that you’ll be blessed like her in the future. you don’t even care if people like the bishop or your schoolteacher or the kids next door loathe you.

( _you knew anastasia and jericho would never hate you and they were all you ever needed_ )

but you do not fight back against her. you’re well aware that once your mother’s mind is made up, it will not change. you’re quite alike in that way, jericho likes to remind you.

you promise never to disobey her again. satisfied with your answer, she stops hitting you but does not erase that look of disappointment on her face. you want that expression to go.

despite your vow, you all have to move anyway.

you are eight years old and you learn that trusting calls for utter obedience.

## [ 5 ]

when you get to america, you regularly attend school with your brother. much as you did before you both moved. 

the main difference to your educational life lies in the style of the classrooms. the desks are of a lighter shade than you’re used to and they’re more spaced out from each other and you notice that every surface is always spotless whenever you and jericho arrive together in the morning, no matter what damage or vandalisation was done to it the day before. 

your mother escorts you two to school for the first time in years, clutching at your shoulders with bitten nails, as though she’s terrified you’ll slip out of her grasp before she can safely deposit you into the care of your new teachers.

it doesn’t take long for the teachers to notice that you don’t know english. despite this, they don’t do anything to help and all choose to let you and jericho both sit mutely in the front row like you aren’t even there. a few other children pick up quickly on the habit. 

after a few days of this, your mother takes action, ushering you both into a small leisure centre halfway between your apartment and the school. once there, it becomes apparent she has signed you up to an english language course. you go to the centre every evening for several hours at a time, picking up on bits and pieces of the garbled tongue you have to master to fit in. 

the three of you sound out the horrible words together on the way back from the course, reminding yourself of what you learned that day.

once you get back to the apartment, all three of you lose your seriousness to mercilessly make fun of the language. your new apartment is almost like your old one -- dusty and cold and full of broken objects -- so you don’t consider it much of a change.

( _why couldn’t you just admit to yourself that you didn’t like any of this?_ )

once you can actually understand your teachers, you try to faithfully follow their instructions. you have been diligently obeying your mother for two years now as you scurry about from place to place, looking for somewhere to settle down; how hard could it be to respect your new instructors?

it dawns on you that you always find it quite hard to trust people, to obey their commands, when you don’t see the advantage in doing so.

the other children giggle when they’re not supposed to, and play pranks on the adults, and you slip easily into their wake, imitating their every action and word, all the while hoping it will make them like you and jericho more. you don’t want to end up in any situation remotely similar to the one you left, with those your age continually avoiding you or insulting you or generally making your lives unpleasant. as though there was something about you that always repulsed other children.

however, all your efforts to ingratiate yourself with your new classmates are disrupted when, whilst fooling around, one child, a boy of nondescript appearance (beyond his cowlicked hair) barges into jericho. 

the teacher left to attend to some business, bestowing charge of the class to a rather large boy residing in the middle of the room. his eyes immediately glazed over when he received the order and you knew at that moment that he would not be able to corral the class. but you didn’t know why the teacher couldn’t see it. 

the children immediately break out into fierce conversation and the boy does not do anything about the situation, perceiving that he cannot rely on the flimsy authority granted to him by the teacher to achieve much. the verbal havoc graduates to physical altercations once it became apparent that the teacher will be away for a very long time. 

reflecting, you later pin down the dismissive look the boy who was shoved into jericho gave your brother, curled lip and arrogant stare, as the source of what makes you snap. not the actual action he took, hurting your brother.

you are enraged.

desks start to shuffle around by themselves, erasers and books clattering onto the floor, the children’s elated cries quietening down into terrified sobs. all you can think about is wiping that pathetic boy’s face clean. about shaking him so hard all his facial features fall out of place, like the potato head dolls you’ve seen a few of the children playing with at recess.

but then your single-minded focus stops when jericho’s fingers, wrapping themselves around your wrist with purposeful care, switch your attention off of the boy’s pinched face.

and onto the chaotic scene around you.

some of the desks are vibrating on the spot, others shrieking across the linoleum floor, and a few even floating. with a cursory glance, you quickly evaluate none of them as levitating more than thirty cm above the ground. 

the remarkable sight makes you gasp with awe.

part of you, after the pandemonium ends, still wants to see how far you can push them to rise. 

“what are you doing, connie?” jericho asks you in a hushed breath. perhaps he’s awed, too.

you swing your gaze away from the scene and, as you try to devise some reply to your brother’s rather open-ended question, the rumbling stops. with some dismay, you identify the drift in your concentration as to blame. 

you try to re-focus on the magic lying dormant in the room but jericho’s nails scratch at your skin, dragging you back to him.

your brother looks… unsure.

despite this uncertainty, he manages to pull you by force out of the school and forces you to walk back home with him without complaint. he’s always had an impressive ability to corral you and your mother.

you cannot move past his complicated expression. not until you come face to face with your mother at any rate. but then, once you do, all you can think about is impressing her with the story of what you did that day.

“i’m magic!” you say, with a wide smile, “like you.”

she gazes upon you with something akin to sorrow and slaps you once more, before pulling you and jericho into her chest and crying. 

you aren’t sure why you keep making her unhappy. why can you never seem to satisfy her?

you are ten years old and when you discover that you can do magic, you make your mother sad. 

## [ 13 ]

on the first anniversary of your leaving the magisterium, you make a breakthrough in your quest to resurrect your brother.

you have been tasked by your master with reanimating a dead man. it takes three weeks but when he finally awakens, he moves with a strong purpose that’s been conspicuously absent from everyone else you’ve ever brought back. his very condition tells you all you need to know about how far you’ve progressed before he even starts talking to you.

your master, who has been working with you on this whole endeavour for a rather long time, grants you a rare smile in the light of your success. he actually pats you on the shoulder when the man remains physically intact and mentally lucid for over seven hours, the furthest any of your non-chaos ridden creations have ever survived. you’re overjoyed at the prospect of satisfying your maser.

but when the resurrected man begins to lose his spark, joseph’s smile falls away. 

like thin wax melting, dripping, from a bony skull. 

( _how didn’t you realise his intentions sooner?_ )

when the deceased returns to his original state, decrepit and lifeless, your master cradles your head in his hands and warns you in a hushed tone about what the consequences will be if you continue to fail.

“you will not achieve your goal if you cannot even do this,” he whispers to you. you do not speak back since you cannot deny the truth of his words.

he advises you with a serious tone that you work on the matter further before daring to get something to eat. once he walks off, you wonder for half a second if you’ll ever satisfy him.

but you are seventeen years old and you ache for your brother every day, so you heed his words and throw yourself into the increasingly challenging task of defeating death.

## [ 4 ]

as your mother bustles you onto an enormous boat laden with metal containers -- all of them far more colourful than the plain wooden building blocks you left behind at the apartment -- she keeps one hand on your back and one on jericho’s.

intent on copying her, you reach out for your brother’s hand. you’re surprised to find it freezing and slightly blue-ish, lying limp and useless by his side, and it takes you a moment to realise that he’s missing one of his dark blue gloves.

whilst your mother shouts over your heads at adults nearby, you whisper, “did you lose your glove?” to which your twin nods, trembling. he’s as pale as the sheets your mother used to bring back to the apartment with her to wash and dry. she used to stretch each one across the beams overhead but since there weren’t many in the rafters the white cloth dangled down in many places, forming a maze that you and your brother used to enjoy playing in.

your mother told you, after you disembarked from the back of a noisy lorry stuffed with people, that you would never see the four white-washed walls of that apartment again.

“take mine,” you urge jericho, stripping off your left glove and forcing it onto his bare hand. your mother let you two buy new mittens a few months back, the old ones getting too small for you to fit your growing hands in, and the two of you decided to get the exact same colour. 

the same midnight hue.

your mother procures all of your clothes and takes care to differentiate them, to prevent either of you feeling like nothing more than a copy of the other. and so, when you brought her the matching gloves, her first reaction was to sigh. but then, you remember that she also smiled down at you before haggling aggressively with the vendor behind the market stall that you selected the mittens from. jericho had grinned too, happy whenever your mother was happy.

( _was that smile what you chased after for years?_ )

back on the boat, your mother finishes her yelling and turns her full attention back onto you two. jericho doesn’t say anything when she notices your gloveless hand and starts scolding you for being so foolish as to lose it. 

you are trying to be an obedient son. you are trying to trust and follow and avoid messing up as you did with the bishop but since you never actually lost the object, it’s rather difficult to feel any guilt over its disappearance and muster the appropriate expression. so you try to stay quiet and simply avoid blurting out the truth. 

somehow, your mother can sense that something is up. she chastises you severely in the hope that you come out with it. but you don’t relent.

eventually, your brother interrupts her endless prodding to suggest that the three of you get moving before all the floor space is taken and you have to spend the journey apart. your mother snaps back that she would never let any of her boys out of her sight and storms over to one of the containers, clutching the two of you by the scruffs of your neck. 

you are nine years old and so is jericho, even though, at times like these, he seems older and wiser; not liking the idea of him being better than you in any way, even if just in age, you wink at your brother and delight as he sticks his tongue out at you, spit flying everywhere.

## [ 11 ]

you’d give anything for him to win that battle of age now.

( _..._ )

you turn fifteen years old and jericho does not and you’re sitting with your mother in front of a dying fire and she’s stroking your hair and struggling to hold back her pleas for jericho to return and every sob conveys an all-consuming regret for her mistake in letting her boys leave her sight and all you have to remember the night that they tell you he died is a face full of painful scars and a head empty of any memories and you have no idea how you’re supposed to live like this.

## [ 16 ]

you have your first ever argument with joseph. it happens after a cluster of children suddenly appear on the battlefield, in the midst of a fierce fight between your forces and those of the magisterium, and your master insists that the chaos-ridden continue on their bloody march, giving no regard to the new arrivals. 

you’re stuck in place, wondering how the mages ever managed to convince a class of what looks like bronze year students, from the sheen of their wristbands, to face you in battle. 

_you_. 

you’ve mastered your makar capabilities, know how to devour anything and everything ahead of you with the void, and have been ravenously consuming the gap between life and death for the past five years now. you know with a keen sense of certainty that you’re probably the most powerful living mage in the world at the moment. maybe the greatest ever.

( _but it wasn’t enough, was it? more than anyone else, you couldn’t satisfy yourself_ )

it’s not as though the magisterium has ever been especially protective toward any of their students -- your quick slide out of rufus’ group, your tampering with dead bodies right under their noses, and the fallout after jericho’s death all proved that to you irrefutably -- but, somehow, you’re shocked by their actions. shocked enough to actually shout at your master.

joseph’s eyes widen, revealing bloodshot whites and heavy eyebags and dull pupils, and he takes several steps back, stumbling over the rocky ground beneath you two. it takes a few seconds for you to realise, through their red-misted vision, that he’s afraid of you.

for some reason, it’s even more surprising to you that he thinks a metre or so of distance could stop you from ripping the skin from his bones or throwing parts of him into the void for the rest of him in the living, material world to miss.

you command all your chaos ridden to stand down. 

although they’ve already acted on joseph’s orders and killed a few children, they obey you now. they have _always_ been under your control alone, even when you didn’t know it. 

you are the sole source of your power.

you are twenty years old and joseph is far older than that and the difference between you and him has always been the size of a vast cavern but you hadn’t been sure of what side you were on until now.

## [ 10 ]

master joseph takes a strong interest in you and your education shortly after it gets around that you’ve awoken as a makar. not that _that_ takes long, of course. the students outside of your group seem to be terrible gossips. whispers follow you wherever you go and you can’t remember if you ever behaved like this. 

you don’t think so.

one day, when your friends are concentrating on improving the puppet show of illusions that you all worked on together, master rufus takes you to one side and tells you that you’ll begin your chaos magic training under the tutelage of his colleague, master joseph. 

you say nothing. for some reason, you’d thought you’d stay in the group. but, _no_ , being special requires being treated differently and that’s what this is and isn’t that what you’ve always wanted? to be extraordinary? and to be independently recognised for it?

you shove down your surprise and smile at your master and wonder aloud if jericho will come with you, to which he frowns slightly and inquires as to why that would be. 

you explain that you did some reading already and learned that all good makars have a counterweight. jericho doesn’t need to say anything for you to know he’d be perfect. if your master is sad to give both of you up, he doesn’t look it and you try to ignore how that makes the little fragments of anger lodged in your heart bristle.

so off the two of you go, to master joseph’s office. it’s in an abandoned section of the magisterium’s needlessly complex cave system, the one you and your brother mapped out your first two years here. you know exactly where you are and where you are going. 

for a while, you can’t hear anything but rhythmic inhaling and exhaling -- it’s both of yours, as synchronised as ever. when you point that synchronicity out to jericho, he smacks you on the shoulder lightly and tells you to stop being so observant, that it’s getting creepy. 

you laugh and stick your tongue out at him.

eventually, you reach master joseph’s door, and jericho knocks once to be polite. when the man neglects to open up, you pound on the wood until you hear shuffling on the other side and know that you’ve been heard. with a wicked smile, you stand back and wait.

for your first session, the middle-aged, greying teacher refuses to teach you anything. which is the _whole_ reason you’re there and not hanging out with your friends, competing to see who can design the best puppet play, so you make to leave. 

only master joseph’s hand around your lower arm stops you from escaping the room.

he explains that he is not a makar and that all his knowledge on chaos magic has been carefully compiled over years of intense research and that, as a result, he quite possibly has the best collection of tomes on chaos magic in the world. he tells you that many people have tried to steal his work. some have snuck into the magisterium and have attempted to abscond with his books. in a lowered voice, he confides in you that others have threatened him for information.

this, he clarifies, is why he is reluctant to share all of what he knows in front of your brother, a normal mage, one of those who tried to hurt him in the past.

honestly, the prospect of learning something so well-protected greatly appeals to you. you think back to the dangerous decision you made when you stole a bible from the church, when you determined that the benefits of actually understanding the origin of the bishop’s preaching far outweighed the cost of being caught.

you interrupt jericho (who’s insisting that he won’t steal the books, that he has absolutely no reason to act like any of the mages master joseph encountered) and tell him he should wait outside during these sessions from now on.

your brother looks at you and for the first time, you aren’t sure what he’s thinking.

( _but you’d always known what he was thinking, and he, you!_ )

but you don’t actually at that moment care to wonder for too long about his feelings. not when you’ve been offered a free platter of appetisers made up of dangerous knowledge by someone your teacher trusts enough to place you under. that makes master joseph someone you should probably trust too.

and so you begin your lessons in earnest with master joseph, less than a week after you realised you even had the ability to interact with the void at all.

when you first make a book disappear, master joseph nods and urges you to do it again.

and you do.

when you manage to make a cage disappear, joseph murmurs something inaudible and orders you to make the one on his desk vanish too.

so you do.

when he tells you to pull something from the void, you’re shocked. you shout back that what he’s asking is impossible, that the two of you have never even so much as read about such a thing being done before in the startlingly long history of chaos magic. he stares at you with such sorrowful eyes and then you’re being shoved out of the office and into the arms of your brother waiting outside -- all before you can so much as apologise.

jericho asks you what happened but you’re too preoccupied with master joseph’s reaction and whatever it was that you did wrong to answer your brother.

somehow, despite being different in every conceivable way, joseph reminds you of your mother. on the day you spilt her secret to the bishop and broke her trust in the church, she stared down at you with similar disappointment in her eyes.

you don’t like disappointing people. you like to vault ahead of every single one of their expectations and show that you’re special in every meaningful sense of the word.

joseph hadn’t slapped you as your mother had. but he might as well have. 

it dawns on you, unresponsive in jericho’s arms, that joseph, unlike your mother, didn’t tell you how to make amends or how to be better in the future. this realisation leaves you frantically questioning what on earth you’re meant to do next, how you can get back into that stuffy room to prove yourself, how you’ll be able to redeem yourself. what you can do for him.

you are fourteen years old and there is nothing you wouldn’t give to impress your master.

## [ 2 ]

cонечко, your mother calls you. _my little sun_.

( _she called you that even after you left her life_ )

she is heaven, able to control something otherworldly, and jericho is the moon, able to effortlessly control the tides of emotion the two of you get caught up in.

you are seven years old and together you three make up the solar system you learn about in class; together you are everything that matters.

## [ 14 ]

joseph brings you dead bodies regularly.

although you worked with them for quite a while before you left the magisterium proper, you never really felt the need before to ask him where they all came from. your master’s assurance that nobody was going to miss them had been enough for you at the time.

but now, since you’ve become an adult, you think it’d be right if you assume some more responsibility. and that, you’re sure, entails being aware of where all the materials for your experiments come.

so you pester and pester and pester joseph until he _finally_ relents and tells you about the deal he has with several graveyard workers across the east coast. 

he brings you out with him one foggy night and you watch with bated breath as your master communicates in silence with a bulky figure dressed in a heavy groundsman’s garb. you weren’t filled in on what the stranger’s name is; no doubt because joseph expects you to remain quiet for however long it takes to dig up a dead body.

the two of them stand about for a while before heading into a nearby cemetery, and you follow them all the way. they stop in front of an unmarked grave and get to work digging up the body below. joseph told you earlier not to reveal yourself until his companion went home, that he would most likely react quite badly to you intruding on their nighttime activity. 

you cannot help but wonder why, though. whatever transgressions the undertaker is committing tonight, whether they be moralistic or legalistic in nature, someone watching him will not worsen it. certainly not if that someone is in cahoots with the very man paying him to do this job.

it’s only once the two men drag out a rotting, wooden coffin, place it onto the muddied grass beside the grave plot, and stand about for a bit to catch their breath that you make your entrance. “hello,” you say simply, with a wave.

both your master and the groundskeeper widen their eyes. 

faster than you’d ever seen him move before, joseph throws his hand over the heart of the man beside him and does something. an incredible amount of light flares up with a furious speed, all-encompassing, all-consuming, and you’re screwing your eyes shut before you notice that it’s already retreating. like a rolling tide. 

the stranger falls over and joseph is in front of you in a flash, digging all his digits into your clothes and pulling you in close. “remember, constantine,” your master whispers, now clutching at your face like a drowning man might a rock, “remember that we are at _war_. and that when i tell you to do something and you disobey me, complications like this will arise.”

you manage to draw your eyes away from the frighteningly still figure lying prone only a few yards from you. his face is obscured by his clothing anyway. looking at him won’t teach you anything. but this? joseph’s words? 

they’re firm. 

and instructive. 

and above all else, they’re useful.

( _and you were always so eager to learn_ )

when you tell him you’ve absorbed the lesson and won’t cause any further _complications_ , he moves his hands around to the back of your scalp and draws you even closer to his face. 

you watch his dry lips crack open as he smiles. there’s a small stream of blood dribbling out at the speed of a glacier. you wish it would fall onto his chin already. 

“oh, no,” he says, “ _that_ wasn’t today’s lesson, constantine.” you shoot him a submissive, confused expression, the best you can muster with long fingers scraping against your nape and reminding you how much your fate rests in his hands, no matter how much he likes to insist to you that you’re both forging your own destinies together. 

he tells you with a sharp grin that he wants to see you raise the groundsman from the dead. 

“i would prefer you do it properly this time,” he warns you with a glint to his beady eyes, reminding you of the intellectual genius that you’ve been chasing ever since you first talked to him in his office all those years ago and realised that you’d finally met someone who had all the answers you could ever lust for. 

“but i’ll settle for another loyal servant,” he adds.

you are eighteen years old and your master is asking for obedience and you’re convinced that you’ll be able to satisfy him -- _even though_ , you think to yourself as he unravels his hands from your face and watches you raise the dead, _you’ve tried that a thousand times and never succeeded before_.

## [ 17 ]

you’re finally in charge of acquiring bodies. three whole years after you first tried to take on more responsibility and joseph pushed you to turn the man he murdered into a puppet.

you’re not entirely sure it would be fair to say that you’ve gotten sick of him. after all, he _is_ the only person alive who seeks out your company -- everyone else either runs from you or stares at you gormlessly, regardless of whether they’re chaos-ridden or not. when you realised the difference in power between you two last year, you remember telling yourself that it didn’t mean that you couldn’t work together anymore.

( _but still, being caught in an endless loop of battles was starting to grate on you, wasn’t it?_ )

joseph actually tries to come along with you to the graveyards now and then. it only takes a single shake of your head to turn him away and part of you, a traitorous side, wonders where the strong and inspiring and knowledgeable man you followed out of the insufferable cradle of your childhood and into the bloody world of your adulthood is. 

he may have been a tad too cautious at the magisterium but you’re _sure_ you remember him being better at standing up to you than this.

usually, day by day, you manage to bury those dangerous thoughts.

however, for some reason, it’s nigh-impossible to suppress them when you dig up bodies. since you have started to do this activity on the regular, it’s getting to be quite the problem.

you only _have_ to grave rob so much and so often because your chaos-ridden keep getting burnt up beyond repair on the battlefield. it doesn’t help that the mages are doing a better job of looking after their fallen troops every single time you encounter one another. it plagues you, actually -- you can’t seem to figure out why they don’t show the same level of care to their living children that they do to their dead soldiers. you’ve been thinking about it for a while now and you still haven’t gotten even a halfway decent answer.

it’s only on your birthday, arms stuck up to their elbows in slimy mud, that you finally realise something. that is to say, you come to an epiphany about your inability to stop yourself from doubting joseph whenever you dig something up. 

when looking upon the bodies you raise, out of the ground and out of death’s clutches, subdued, uncomplimentary thoughts about joseph beg to be allowed to rise out of the murky depths of your brain. but you push them further down. normally, you succeed at suppressing these doubts but the juxtaposition, between the upward actions of your body and the downward ones of your mind, is what’s stopping you from batting away the invasive ideas.

once you know the problem’s root cause, it becomes surprisingly easy to deal with.

you’ve already strayed too far from your original intention of bringing back your brother. you can’t afford to doubt and wholly break ties with the only person on earth who wants to work with you, no matter how lost your aim has become. you need joseph, even if you don’t need him as much as you used to, or as much as _he_ needs you.

you are caught in a nightmarish war that serves you no purpose. you want to turn away from it and focus on resurrecting jericho. that’s all you ever _really_ wanted. 

but you know you cannot end your conflict with the mages. you are the person who started this fight to begin with and wars do not end until someone is dead or broken beyond repair. 

you still have your mission. you cannot afford to lose, no matter how much at times you wish it could all be over already. and so, you cannot be the one to break.

you are twenty-one years old and you are the one who started this story.

## [ 8 ]

you’re researching elementals one evening in the library. it had begun as a homework task but quickly morphed beyond that because something about the subject really _intrigues_ you. you’re staying up late trying to figure out when and where the elementals first started appearing, when and how mages around the world first realised that they were their kin, devoured by excessive magic use, and why exactly so many people came to the shared conclusion that they’d be very good as tools of war.

but, instead of reaching any definite conclusions on all these questions, you end up stumbling across a beaten-up, old copy of the bible. the orthodox one.

it’s red and smooth and in english but it still brings back so many memories of freezing nights spent squinting at long, droning passages, searching for knowledge. reading by the light of the moonlight because your mother preferred there be no magic-fuelled light whilst you all slept. back there, you hadn’t had access to the kind of electricity that now illuminates your american apartment, the one you only return to every summer.

you wonder, with a flush of anger, why your mother barely used her fire magic, preferring to use the cheap and poor quality matches they sold at the local corner store during the day to light lamps. and then, you question why she let the fireplace go cold every night when you and jericho most needed it.

if you were in her place, you think, standing beside a tall shelf filled with mundane religious texts, unable to either put the bible back or take it to the library table you’ve set up shop in, you would have kept the braziers hot every hour of every day.

angry, and lost in this fury, you rip open the book and

_Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honour God with your bodies._

and the passage stares at you from the open page, and a creeping sensation you can’t immediately put your finger on crawls up your spine.

you think back to the elementals you’ve been studying, how they were used for their bodies, for the magic that they could channel better than any single human. they served their once fellow mages, now their masters, who traded them like mere goods to be bought and sold and haggled over at bazaars. they served them faithfully and where did it leave them?

right where they started.

elementals are inhuman, are unlike anything you’d ever considered before, but they actually remind you a lot of humanity. bound to forever serve the forces of life and death according to the will of a distant god, despite amassing great quantities of power. 

but maybe the problem was that it wasn’t their own power. mages borrowed energy from the natural world around them to perform magic but could still function without it. the devoured, on the other hand, were utterly reliant on it, had all made themselves dependent on it -- so much so that the elementals were unable to function without energy from the elements. 

they were slaves.

it was this enslavement that made them so vulnerable to outside control, to the mages they had thought themselves close to as well as to god and his plan for the world.

the elementals’ tragic condition was not the result of flawed and feverish desires to acquire greater strength, like the books all said; rather, it was their immense reliance upon the source of their power, and the lack of freedom this dependency conferred on them, that prevented all of them from ever being truly powerful.

they could not be mighty because they were not independent.

because they were not free.

( _was this why you walked alone?_ )

you are thirteen years old and you stuff these thoughts down, to resurface years later, to focus on the homework task in front of you, the completion of which will bring you the praise you are currently focused on acquiring.

## [ 18 ]

the magisterium has been sending children to fight against you for some years now. it’s still as deplorable as the first time they did but this time you finally understand why. you actually get _why_ the older mages are so keen to push the next generation towards almost certain death, with seemingly little consideration for what happens to them on the battlefields that have been raging up and down the eastern coast. 

every time your chaos-ridden forces murder another innocent child, the magisterium gain the fanatic loyalty of another family full of experienced mages. 

a fair trade-off.

( _you were both monsters, weren’t you?_ )

all you can feel anymore toward the magisterium’s decision is an immense disappointment. disappointment that you were ever played so easily. 

only you lie at fault here. joseph can’t be blamed -- he hasn’t been in control of things on your side for a while now. you, on the other hand, stretched out for responsibility years ago and haven’t shrunk back since, not after that first night in the graveyard. looking back, that moment watered a seed of independence that had long ago been buried within your soul, nurtured the idea that you couldn’t, shouldn’t, rely on your master like a crutch. that to depend on others for power, excusing it as obedience or loyalty or, even, long ago, _love_ , was to enslave yourself and neuter your ambitions.

you refuse to inhibit yourself like that. 

_(inhibit?_ )

you have to dabble with god’s instruments to overcome the master himself.

by this point in the war, you already know that you cannot limit yourself with reservations about killing children, lest it be taken as a sign of weakness. and so you order your chaos ridden to kill without mercy and kill they do, just as they always have -- zombies without morals that they are.

 _everything_ is the same in your life, even after eight years of fighting. jericho isn’t back yet. your old friends still hate you. your mother waits and waits. you wade through a chaotic universe inhabited by only two entities: yourself and god.

that’s why you do not flinch when the magisterium’s devious plan finally reveals itself to you. it changes nothing about your circumstances, nothing about your decisions, and nothing about the future you envision for yourself.

only the appearance of verity torres startles you.

much as with the issues of twinship that arose in your first year, it hadn’t occurred to you to watch out for the arrival of another makar. you hadn’t anticipated that a chaos magician would enter the fray so soon after your own self-discovery. it was also quite unbelievable that she would fall into the laps of the virginian magisterium, exactly as you did.

after observing dark hair and darker magic swirling about a tiny stature in the middle of the field for a while, noting her rudimentary skill and obvious inexperience with this strand of magic, you start to wonder if she was born with her powers by chance and had only recently discovered them or whether god had just gifted them to her to stop you from progressing any further with your plans.

instead of fearing this development, you welcome it.

you bear a grin, cracking the stone, unmovable expression you’ve worn for so long.

this is a sign that you’re getting closer, that you’re on the right path. that there can’t be much longer to go. that jericho will return soon, bringing with him a chance to rest, bringing with him absolute proof that you had exceeded all expectations and proved yourself. to your brother, who thought your meddling with chaos magic dangerous; to your mother, who waits for only one boy to come home; to your old companions, who shouted that you were bound for failure.

you are twenty-two years old and you’re nearly there.

## [ 15 ]

you fight on battlefields every other day.

accompanied by a legion of rotting corpses, you trudge onto flat plains or rocky hills or sandy beachfronts, every conceivable landscape, and await the mages. even though they haven’t yet discovered your main base of operations, they always respond to your sudden arrivals anywhere on the east coast with a rapid deployment of elementals and masters.

they don’t attempt to communicate with you anymore -- not after the last time you encountered master rufus and ordered one of your chaos-ridden to bite his head off.

even though the man escaped relatively unharmed, you’re sure he was angered enough to present a case to the rest of his colleagues that they needed to give up on communicating with their sole makar. it’s the only thing that explains how quickly they shifted from greeting you with hostile, terse words to meeting your appearances with immediate violence.

you’re pleased with this outcome. you don’t want to go back. not whilst the whole magisterium preys on you for your special talent without letting you work on your plan to bring jericho back. you have no interest in partaking in such an unbalanced arrangement.

( _but what about joseph -- can’t you see how much he uses you?_ )

even if your master hasn’t been incredibly helpful these days, waylaid by logistical problems and unable to assist you in your experiments anymore, he allows you to search for what you need, which is much, _much_ more than the other mages can offer.

you are nineteen years old and even though you are planning on shaking up the world, turning it upside down to set some key things right, you are just, ever so slightly, for the first time in forever, somewhat content with your place in it.  
  


  
  


## [ 20 ]

the mages beg you to stop. you do not.

it’s as though they are under the deluded impression that you pausing will solve anything. as though it will bridge the unbridgeable gap between your high ambitions and the limits of the mage world. but, since you’ve found that community quite short-sighted in the past, it doesn’t take long for you to acknowledge their senseless cries as part of the inherent feebleness of magefolk.

as you draw the remaining breath out from a coughing woman’s lungs and use the air to blow back the few people daring to attack you, those not awaiting their deaths with patience, you reconsider the common mage’s impression of you. perhaps they think you crazed, acting for no reason at all, driven insane by your rare form of magic. that would explain why so few outside of the small circle you associate with seem to understand your goals.

apart from sharing a tragic likelihood of failing in their very last moments, special people like yourself have always been misunderstood by those around them.

with spears fashioned from the icy walls around you, you launch cold projectiles into the group of mages charging at you, having regrouped from your dispersal of their previous attempt. the lot of them are immediately impaled. you do not flinch from the destruction you have caused. 

after jericho’s death, you picked a fight with the very nature of existence itself. bringing him back, restoring balance to your universe, returning the moon to its rightful path, had far outweighed the loss of every life you have ever taken. 

but now, you’re not so sure that it does.

not anymore. 

your doubts matter little, though -- you have been carving out a bloody path strewn with corpses and lofty ambitions for so long that there are no other routes left for you to traverse.

( _you would have taken one if you could see it?_ )

indeed. you have been spending so much time and energy bothering to fight other mages in person -- as opposed to letting your chaos-ridden grunts to bear the brunt of each encounter -- because you hope that one of them will help you by offering you a resolution of some kind. a conclusion to this story.

you are so tired.

you want to stop and to break and to find someone who can trade your life for jericho’s, giving you both what you need. giving the world what it needs.

but your exhaustion doesn’t matter. the world is unfeeling and indifferent to your pleas. death has already claimed jericho, leaving no room for life to intercede. it’s all up to you.

no obedience means full responsibility.

it means that when you finish dealing with all the cave’s denizens and finally spot the novak twins, sarah huddled against the frozen wall, declan crouched before her, and when that sight is the first to ever make you truly stop, more so than when verity torres blew up the battlefield and your expectations, and when declan seizes hold of your distraction to strike you, you have no one but yourself to blame for your injury. nor do you have anyone but yourself to blame for your retaliation and murder of one of your only friends. 

even though you stopped thinking of him as your friend and he undoubtedly stopped considering you as one of his, he did not leave your universe. 

your planets, like all those in your sphere, never disconnect once connected. the worse that happens, and has happened, is that the ties between celestial bodies distort. jericho’s consistent influence over your actions, long after his own demise, is an all too fitting testament to that fact.

and so, your heart is aching, leaking violent bloody trails like tears. 

it continues to wail as you approach sarah and prepare yourself to destroy her, just like you have to every other living soul in this cave. you wonder how you will behave in the future with three ghosts haunting you instead of only one.

but, as you strike downward, your old friend attacks upward.

you know as soon as the magic connects that the injury she deals you is fatal, much like the one you inflict on her. neither you nor she will make it out of la rinconada tonight.

in your last few moments of consciousness, you utilise everything, all the knowledge and skills and energy, that you have accumulated across your admittedly rather short life to transfer your soul into that of the only intact body nearby. sarah’s baby.

you’re twenty-four years old and you’ll never age any further than that, not in your original body. but, maybe, just maybe, in another’s you --

* * *

  
  
  


( _that baby was me_ )

yes, it was.

( _why did you do it?_

_why did you do what you did, in the end?_ )

i had to.

you have seen my life. you know who i am. 

who i have always wanted to be.

( _so, what, you wanted to be free from the impossible expectations you set for yourself?_ )

in part. 

weren’t you paying attention, call?

  
  
  


do you think that’s all it was?

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> (my original note here deleted itself ... oof)
> 
> i hope u enjoyed reading this & pls let me know in the comments if u spot typos/inconsistencies — and also if u wanna chat abt it ahaha. u can also message me on my tumblr: @fxthieves ! ❤️


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